522
DRAMA
portrayal to the criticism of life, or in other words, to the expression of Mr Shaw’s very peculiar individuality. Two of his comedies, however, Arms and the Man (1894) and The Devil's Disciple (1898), have had some success on the American stage • and occasional performances have proved that the wit of Candida and You Never Can Tell is at least as effective in the theatre as in the pages of Plays, Pleasant and Unpleasant (1898). It is not, of course, suggested that The Second Mrs Tanqueray was the cause of that enlargement in the aims and methods of drama which has marked the years since its production. It was rather the decisive symptom of a pre-existent tendency. Mr Pinero demonstrated to authors, managers, and the public the unreality of that superstition which declared the modern English stage foredoomed to intellectual impotence. Other playwrights have succeeded, not by imitating him, but simply by availing themselves of the extension of frontier which, at two strides, as it were, marked by The Profligate and Mrs Tanqueray, he had vindicated for his craft. These two plays constituted an “effective occupation” of territory hitherto supposed inaccessible to the British dramatist—territory which now belongs to the public domain. To the unprejudiced observer it is manifest that the English drama of to-day stands on a totally different plane from that which it occupied twenty-five, or even fifteen, years ago. Yet it is still far from taking the place it ought to take in the intellectual life of the country. For one thing, it has still to struggle against unfortunate financial conditions, of which the most hampering is the necessity of appealing to an enormous public on pain of finding none at all. There is no middle course between a continuous run of at least three months and absolute failure. If only as offering a loophole of escape from the pressure of the long-run system, the endowed Repertory Theatre for which Professor Ward sighed in concluding, in 1877, his article Drama in the ninth edition of this work, is as much as ever to be desiderated. Some of the limitations of the modern English drama, however, are to be traced, not to external conditions, but to a certain narrowness of outlook on the part of the authors themselves, combined with a deficiency in what may be called, in the largest sense of the term, philosophic grasp of life. Most of the leading playwrights of Great Britain have served their apprenticeship either as actors or as adapters and melodramatists. They have begun at the bottom of the ladder, and have in their early years acquired technical skill (some of which they have afterwards had to unlearn) to the comparative exclusion of intellectual culture. Only a few have approached the special work of the dramatist from the side of general literary accomplishment. Chief among the latter class stands Mr Stephen Phillips (b. 1866), who had won distinction as a poet before his Paolo and Francesca (published 1899) gave proof of his power as a dramatist. The success of his tragedy of Herod (1900) has awakened hopes of a revival of poetic drama, which have been strengthened by the almost simultaneous revival in the younger generation of actors of the power of speaking verse with smoothness and sonority. The American drama has during the past decade shown a progressive tendency as marked, if not quite as vigorous, as that which we have been tracing in England. Down to about 1890 the influence of France had been even more predominant in America than in England. The only American dramatist of eminence, Mr Bronson Howard {b. 1842), was a disciple, though a very able 0Ile, States ^ ie French school. A certain stirring of native originality manifested itself during the ’eighties, when a series of semi-improvised farces, associated with the names of two actor-managers, Harrigan and
Hart, depicted low life in Hew York with real observation, though in a crude and formless manner. About the same time a native style of popular melodrama began to make its appearance—a play of conventional and negligible plot, which attracted by reason of one or more faithfully observed character-types, generally taken from country life. The Old Homestead, written and acted by Denman Thompson, was the most popular play of this class. Rude as it was, it distinctly foreshadowed the subsequent course of development. The drama, indeed, has simply followed in the track of fiction. Almost every district and every city in the Union has its novelist-interpreter who faithfully studies, with more or less ability, local character-types and their environment; and it is in similarly attaching itself to definite localities that the American drama has done its best work. Ibsen has had little or no influence in America, but the stimulus of the Theatre Libre has been felt to some extent in various experimental enterprises. It was at a sort of Free Theatre in Boston that Mr James A. Herne {d. 1901) produced in 1891 his realistic‘drama of modern life, Margaret Fleming, which did a great deal to awaken the interest of literary America in the theatrical movement. Mr Herne, an actor and a most accomplished stage-manager, next produced a drama of rural life in Hew England, Shore Acres (1892), which made an immense popular success. It was a play of the Old Homestead type, but very much more coherent and artistic. His next play, Griffith Davenport (1898), founded on a novel, was a drama of life in Virginia during the Civil War, admirable in its strength and quiet sincerity; while in his last work, Sag Harbour (1900), Mr Herne returned to the study of rustic character, this time in Long Island. Mr Herne showed human nature in its more obvious and straightforward aspects, making no attempt at psychological subtlety; but withiu his own limits he was an admirable craftsman. The same preoccupation with local colour is manifest in the plays of Mr Augustus M. Thomas, a writer of genuine humour and originality. His localism announces itself in the very titles of his most popular plays—Alabama, In Mizzoura, Arizona. Mr Clyde Fitch, a young playwright of indubitable ability, has made experiments in several directions, notably in that of quasi-historical drama {Nathan Hale, Barbara Frietchie), but his chief bent seems to be in the direction of social drama on the French model. Mr William Gillette, a very popular actor, has written several melodramas of such marked originality and power as almost to raise them to the rank of literature. It must be said, however, that the financial conditions of the American stage are even more hostile to original drama than those which we have noted in England, while the fact that American managers have not only the French but the English stage to draw upon, tends to restrict the field open to native endeavour. It remains to say a few words of the English literary drama, as opposed to the acted drama. The two classes are not nearly so distinct as they once were; but plays continue to be produced from time to time which are wholly unfitted for the theatre, and others which, though they may be experimentally placed on the stage, make their appeal rather to the reading public. Concluding in 1877 his survey of the English drama, Dr Ward remarked, “The latest English dramatic poet is Tennyson.” The late Poet Laureate had in his old age attempted an art which is scarcely to be mastered after the energy of youth has passed away. He continued to the last to occupy himself more or less with drama, and all his plays, except Harold, found their way to the stage. The Cup and Bechet, as we have seen, met with a certain success, but The Promise of May (1882),
